Last time, we talked about content plans and why you’d want to go through the trouble of making one for your content. Today, I’m going to share with you my best tips for how to make and use a content plan.
Before you start, think about how far into the future you want to plan. Do you want to plan the next month, two months, six months, or more? Consider what you hope to achieve with your content plan and what works for your content type. For example, for a personal vlog channel, video plans might change constantly as your life influences your videos, but for a podcast, you can plan subject matter ahead of time (and you should, especially if you’re conducting interviews).
When you’ve got an idea of your timeframe, it’s time to start planning. So, how does it work?
In my experience, a content plan goes through the following steps.
- Brain dump – get down your ideas
- Organize – categorize and prioritize your ideas
- Assign – set your publishing schedule and deadlines
- Break it down – turn your ideas into tasks
- Incorporate – find the best way to add these tasks into your life
- Adapt – check in regularly to add, move, swap, cancel, and rewrite your plan
Let’s get into the details. Grab a snack and a glass of water, because this post is packed with lots of information.
Brain Dump
What it is
I’ve talked about the brain dump before, and I live by it. The brain dump is the time to dream up all the awesome stuff you want to make. No idea is too big or too small. No idea is bad. Free your mind from judgment and list out every possible piece of content you might want to create, even if you don’t feel fully equipped to tackle some of your ideas right now.
Why it’s important
You have to get the ideas out before you can make them real, and you’ll get the best ideas when you’ve squeezed everything you can out of your brain. When you’re done, you should have a long list of ideas, varying from small, large, fresh, tried-and-true, boring, can’t-wait-to-start-it… you get it.
The most important distinction to make at this point, in my opinion, is to mark which content you feel confident that you could make today versus the content that you need to grow into. Too many creators overlook the awesome opportunity to learn from creating content; it’s not just about teaching. Sharing information about topics you’re an expert in (or at least comfortable with) is valuable work, but showcasing your journey into topics that are challenging for you can be an amazing way to not only expand your skills but to connect with your audience.
Unleash your wildest ideas
Give yourself a no-judgment space and write down every idea you can muster. Dream up big ideas that you might not feel quite ready for, and cover subjects that you can grow into as you expand your skills.
Organize
What it is
Now that you have your ideas splattered all over your screen or paper, it’s time to organize them into something coherent. You can roughly break them up into ideas you can act upon right now, ideas you want to do in the next couple months, and ideas that need more time. Or, you can categorize them by subject matter if that works for you.
Why it’s important
Generating ideas is fun, but it only gets you so far. Lots of people stop there and wonder why they still struggle to get off the content treadmill. Organizing your ideas gives you the opportunity to evaluate, prioritize, and think through your ideas. You can see how they relate to one another and how they relate to the bigger picture behind what you do. You have a better sense of what’s in front of you, which gets you one step closer to making your ideas actionable.
For example…
Beauty bloggers often categorize ideas by holiday or time of year: Valentine’s Day (date night makeup looks and outfits), back to school (makeup looks for school, clothing hauls, outfits, DIYs for school), holiday seasons (gift shopping, makeup looks for holiday parties, outfits for cold weather, “what I got” hauls) and so on.
Informational blogs like this one might take on themes, such as the content planning posts this month. Or a food blogger might take on cuisine from a different country every two weeks.
It’s your content—you can decide what you want to convey and how to organize your ideas to tell your story.
Bring order to your brain dump
A page full of ideas can leave you excited, but not knowing where to start. Organizing gives you focus as you decide what experience you want to provide for your audience, and how you want to group ideas together. It’s the first step to making your ideas actionable.
Assign
What it is
You may have gotten some inclinations about when you want to publish certain content ideas while you were organizing. Now’s the time to decide and make it so, whether you want to assign specific dates or set more general timelines.
The farther in advance you can plan, the more you get out of this planning session. However, as I mentioned in the previous post, it’s likely that priorities will shift or new ideas will get thrown in when you plan more than four or so months ahead.
I recommend treating the upcoming month or two as set in stone, with everything else being more fluid. Then, when plans change or you have an amazing idea that just can’t wait, you can add them to your content plan and shift everything else back. We’ll talk more about adapting later on in this post.
Why it’s important
This is the step that removes the question “What should I do next?” from your vocabulary. Assigning content to a schedule, even if you don’t use hard deadlines, tells you what’s next and when to get it done. You also get a long-term view of your work as you plan your content in advance.
For example…
I own a few different blogs and YouTube channels in addition to working a full-time job, so I can’t always guarantee when exactly a new post or video will be up. I used to try to force strict publishing dates upon myself, but I found that the added pressure on top of my daily life exhausted me.
Instead, I have a target for each site or channel every month and place content ideas into each month’s bucket for a few months at a time. Doing this work ahead of time removes any barriers I might have to get started on my next video or blog post after a long work day—no more “Which of these five ideas do I want to do?” or “I’m too tired to think of something to write about.” I simply see what’s next in my plan and jump right in.
I’m happy to use my beauty blog and YouTube channel to show you what this looks like. My target for my beauty content is one video and one post per month. So my content plan looks something like this.
April: Spring Cleaning
- Broke for Beauty: Spring cleaning – makeup and nail polish purge and reorganization (break into a two-part video if needed)
- Include resources to link to drawer dividers, etc. that I’m using with Amazon affiliate links
- Broke for Beauty blog: Spring cleaning – empties review
May
- Broke for Beauty: Spring Causebox unboxing
- If I can get this done in April, post My Current Style Favorites instead
- Broke for Beauty blog: Roundup Review – skincare that’s not in my regular routine (masks and sheet masks)
- Include my skincare favorites Kit from my resources page in the post, or create a new one with just the products mentioned
June
- Broke for Beauty: How I Edit My Videos
- Broke for Beauty blog: Review – Urban Decay Primer and Setting Spray Duo
And so on. Since it’s just about April, I consider April to be completely set, with room to add the video from May if I have the extra time that I think my work schedule will allow. May is pretty set but with some wiggle room, and June’s content isn’t time-sensitive, so it can be pushed back if anything comes up like a vacation (which lets me pull in ideas like “what I’m packing” or “how to travel light”).
I use a product management tool to plan out my content across all my sites and channels, so it doesn’t look exactly like this, but this is how I start my planning whenever I need to wrap my head around the next few months.
Give your ideas a due date
Deadlines inspire progress and remove the dreaded blank-screen moment of “Uh… What should I work on?” But this isn’t school—you decide how specific your deadlines are. You might find that you get more done with strict publishing dates and deadlines for each step along the way. Or you might be like me and set your content by month so you can space things out across your free time.
The point of this step is to take your content seriously and make a schedule. Find what works for you and stick with it.
Break It Down
What it is
You have great ideas and you’ve set a publishing schedule, so the planning is over, right?
Nope.
If you stop here, you’re probably going to sit down to work and not know where to start. This is where procrastination sneaks in: This seems like a big project, and I don’t have enough time to get it done right now. Maybe I’ll get a burst of inspiration tomorrow morning…
The problem isn’t how little time you have, it’s that your scheduled content ideas don’t give you actionable next steps. You’re not setting yourself up for success when each task on your to-do list is an entire project in itself.
Everyone has different ideas of how small a task must be before it feels actionable, so here’s my guiding rule: your next step should be ridiculously easy. If you look at the next step on your list and your first reaction isn’t, “I can get that done now,” then it’s still too big.
Yes, this means that the list of steps for each piece of content is long. Don’t be alarmed if you feel a bit intimidated seeing it all written out in a long, daunting list. Because each step is small, they’ll likely snowball into each other so you can cover two or three per working session.
Why it’s important
Breaking your content into actionable steps gives you a realistic view of everything you have to do to get your idea off the ground. You’ll find time that you didn’t know you had when each step is small and easy to accomplish. Recognizing these steps builds momentum as you cross off the small tasks that eventually lead to a finished product.
For example…
Every content type has unique steps, and every creator has their own way of building their content, but I’ll show you how I work through a video on my content plan.
Here’s how I generally break down my videos.
- Ideas and notes: a quick bullet list of what I want to cover, what I might need to change in my filming
setup, or anything else that comes to mind. - Film
- Optional smaller tasks, using the spring cleaning video idea from earlier in this post: purge unwanted nail polish, purge unwanted makeup, organize my makeup corner, film intro
and outro
- Optional smaller tasks, using the spring cleaning video idea from earlier in this post: purge unwanted nail polish, purge unwanted makeup, organize my makeup corner, film intro
- Import footage and audio
- Optional smaller tasks: import to my computer, create a project in Final Cut Pro, import to Final Cut Pro.
- Rough cut
- Optional smaller tasks: Place raw footage and audio with channel intro and end screen, align audio to footage, cut footage and mark where more editing is needed
- Final cut
- Optional smaller tasks: treat each mark for further editing as its own task
- Upload to YouTube
- Create a thumbnail from my template
- Create images to share on social media from my templates
- Publish or schedule
- Promote: post to Twitter and Facebook
There are many steps, but each step is contained and doable in one go. Often, one step rolls into another, like importing my footage and audio, then starting my rough cut while I have Final Cut Pro open. I also use some of the waiting time to bundle steps together, like creating my thumbnail and social media images while I export my final cut and upload it to YouTube.
Make your ideas actionable
If your list isn’t actionable, then it’s no good. Don’t leave an entire post, video, or podcast episode as a single task on your to-do list. Break down your projects into steps so small that your next step seems easy, and combine tasks to get more done in less time.
Incorporate
What it is
You have to figure out how to fit your actionable next steps into your day-to-day life. Whether you prefer to knock it all out in one weekend or spread it out over a few days, nothing happens until you do.
It’s nice to think that you might magically get a burst of inspiration at an opportune time and you can get everything done all at once, but that’s both unlikely and unreliable. You have to find a sustainable way to insert your projects into your regular life and routine so that they happen slowly (but surely).
Deciding how to combine projects is another key part of this. Some creators like to focus on one project, from writing to editing to publishing, before moving onto the next. Others prefer to use what’s called batching—grouping like tasks together across multiple projects—to write a few blog posts at once, for example, then edit them, then schedule them to be published ahead of time.
Neither method (or any combination of them) is objectively better or worse. Everyone’s daily routine and working style are unique to them. It’s a good idea to try new approaches to your content and figure out what you like best.
Why it’s important
Your project will roll over into next week, month, and eternity unless you find a way to do the work alongside everything else in your life. Finding ways to add your content to-dos into your daily life both serves your audience with new, regular content and keeps you from feeling too overwhelmed while you do it.
Your content is part of your life. It isn’t your whole life. You could always be doing more to make your content better, every second of every day, so be mindful about incorporating your content into your life in a healthy way.
For example…
To continue with the video examples I’ve been using from my life, let’s look at my April and May content.
I use what I like to call prioritized batching. I batch many of my tasks together, but I don’t use it in every context (editing videos, for example, can get very boring). After I’ve batched what I can, I prioritize my next steps for what’s next on my content plan. I’ve also learned when I need some space within a project: between finishing the rough cut and polishing it into the final cut, and between drafting a post and editing it. I use those spaces to get ahead on the later projects in my content plan.
Let’s see how I can incorporate some tasks into my day-to-day life. Remember, I have a full-time job during the work week, so this example reflects that.
Saturday afternoon: photos and long filming sessions
- Take photos for my empties review and skincare roundup review blog posts
- Film the spring cleaning clips: purging my unwanted makeup and nail polish, reorganizing my makeup corner
Sunday afternoon: batch filming and import
- Film the intro and outro for my spring cleaning video, with an extra intro and outro in case I split it into two videos
- Film the spring Causebox unboxing
- Film clips of my favorite style items
- Create a Final Cut Pro project for each video
- Import all the footage and audio into the projects
- Add the channel opening and closing screens around the unedited footage
- Import the photos for my blog posts into my photo archive folder
Evening after work: rough cut
- Start the rough cut for my spring cleaning video
- Decide if I need to split the idea into two videos – let’s pretend that I’ve decided to split it
- Finish the rough cuts for the videos
Morning before work: blog post work
- Jot down ideas and notes for the empties review and the skincare roundup review
- Create headings and start writing the reviews
Evening after work: video and photo editing
- Review the rough cuts
- Finish the final cuts
- Edit the photos for my blog posts
- Upload the photos and embed them into the posts
Evening after work: video uploads
- Upload the videos to YouTube
- During the upload, create the thumbnails
- Schedule the videos and grab the links
- Create a post for the blog in WordPress and outline it, embed the videos
Morning before work/weekend morning: blog post drafting
- Write the post with the embedded videos
- Schedule the post
- Finish the draft for the empties review
Evening after work/weekend afternoon: video editing
- Rough cut for my Causebox unboxing video
(Etc.)
My evenings and weekends are when I can reliably work on my content. The exception is that I tend to get my best writing done in the mornings, so I tend to save my writing tasks for days when I can have an extended morning at home before work or on the weekend. This provides a great break in my schedule, and it gives me time away from my video editing so I can come back with fresh eyes.
While there are a few tasks per working session in this example, many of them are quick and play well together. I don’t spend more than thirty minutes to an hour during my morning work sessions, or one or two hours during my evening work sessions. If I don’t finish what I’m doing, I take note of what’s left to do and move on. Blocking off time in your calendar explicitly for your content can help you manage your time and not get stuck in the burnout trap of “I’m not quite done, so I have to keep going… Only a few more minutes…”
Keep in mind that these working sessions don’t necessarily happen every single day, either. I often take a night or two off at a time to focus on other projects or to take a break entirely. I give myself plenty of time to relax, enjoy other hobbies, and go out with friends, and I recommend that you do the same.
Your content is part of your life
Incorporate your content into your life to make regular progress on your projects and goals. Discover which times of day let you do your best work and reserve that time for your content. Note which tasks you like to do together, either within one project or across many projects, and block off the time you need in your calendar. When your time is up, note where you left off and put it away so you can get on with the rest of your life.
Adapt
What it is
Your content plan is continually changing as you shift deadlines, reorder content, and plan out your next ideas. Adapting is about checking in regularly to see how you’re doing so you can move things around when your priorities change or when you’re not on track.
If you have less time to work on a piece of content than you thought you would, you don’t have to be stuck. You can pull a smaller idea from your backlog of ideas in your content plan. Or when a time-sensitive idea pops up, you can easily swap it with another idea in your content plan.
I mentioned this in my last post, but I’ll repeat it here: it’s easy to rearrange a list of content that you already have. If you have no clear plan at all, it can be difficult to manage changes without hitting a wall as you try to pick yourself back up and figure out what’s next.
Why it’s important
Plans come up, life gets stressful, and content ideas strike out of nowhere. When you treat your content plan like a living document, you give it room to grow with you. Those just-out-of-reach ideas from your brain dump might come sooner than you think, so you can move them up. Or, you might need a little more time to research a certain subject or try a new method before you share it with your audience.
Your content plan gives you room to be kind to yourself when you’re not always on top of your tasks. If you have extra stress in your life and take a week or two off of creating content, it’s not the end of the world. Kicking yourself for missing a content deadline doesn’t get that content out faster. Enforcing a deadline that no longer works for you doesn’t help you, either. Adapting your plan and moving on does.
Be flexible with changing plans
Check in with your content plan and adapt as you go. Your content plan lets you be open to those moments of brilliance that throw off the rest of your plan and to be flexible when you need to push out some of your ideas to another week or month.
Your Content Plan Frees You
When you follow these steps, you’ll have a content plan full of organized ideas that excite you, a schedule, and clear breakdown of actionable next steps for each piece of content. Your plan gives you the space you need to adapt as plans and priorities change.
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